Many of you will be wanting to run Windows applications within your Linux installation, and you can do this via the wonderful [[Wine]]. This guide will show you how to alter your MIME database in a safe way so that you can associate Windows executables with Wine.

Many of you will be wanting to run Windows applications within your Linux installation, and you can do this via the wonderful [[Wine]]. This guide will show you how to alter your MIME database in a safe way so that you can associate Windows executables with Wine.

'''Warning''': Do NOT attempt to modify the mime database directly!

'''Warning''': Do NOT attempt to modify the mime database directly!

Revision as of 02:05, 30 August 2011

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Many of you will be wanting to run Windows applications within your Linux installation, and you can do this via the wonderful Wine. This guide will show you how to alter your MIME database in a safe way so that you can associate Windows executables with Wine.
Warning: Do NOT attempt to modify the mime database directly!

In this example, we are going to define rox as the file handler of a file called "test.mp4".

The mime type somehow is in the file so it is not the app that says "use mime type x on this file" but it's rather "use whatever mime type is associated with this file". To see a mime type of a file called test.mp4 use this command:

$ xdg-mime query filetype test.mp4

In my example I got this:

audio/mp4; charset=binary

Now we set the mime-type, in my example I want to use rox to handle this file, and then configure rox to use vlc:

$ xdg-mime default rox.desktop audio/mp4

Since I already set the default action for that file in rox with a right-click and then using "vlc" as the command, this now works beautifully.

If you are wondering, setting the default app for a mime type will edit the file